Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

320 J HOW THE MIND WORKScurved tube or when a whirling tetherball was cut loose. A depressinglylarge minority, including many who had taken physics, guessed that itwould continue in a curving path. (Newton's first law states that a movingobject continues to move in a straight line unless a force acts on it.)The students explained that the object acquires a "force" or "momentum"(some students, remembering the lingo but not the concept, called it"angular momentum"), which propels it along the curve until themomentum gets used up and the path straightens out. Their beliefscome right out of the medieval theory in which an object is impressedwith an "impetus" that maintains the object's motion and gradually dissipates.These howlers come from conscious theorizing; they are not whatpeople are prepared to see. When people view their paper-and-pencilanswer as a computer animation, they burst out laughing as if watchingWile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner over a cliff and stopping inmidair before plunging straight down. But the cognitive misconceptionsdo run deep. I toss a ball straight up. After it leaves my hand, whichforces act on it on the way up, at the apogee, and on the way down? It'salmost impossible not to think that momentum carries the ball upagainst gravity, the forces equal out, and then gravity is stronger andpushes it back down. The correct answer is that gravity is the only forceand that it applies the whole time. The linguist Leonard Talmy pointsout that the impetus theory infuses our language. When we say The ballkept rolling because the wind blew on it, we are construing the ball as havingan inherent tendency toward rest. When we say The ridge heft thepencil on the table, we are imbuing the pencil with a tendency towardmotion, not to mention flouting Newton's third law (action equals reaction)by imputing a greater force to the ridge. Talmy, like most cognitivescientists, believes that the conceptions drive the language, not the otherway around.When it comes to more complicated motions, even perception failsus. The psychologists Dennis Proffitt and David Gilden have asked peoplesimple questions about spinning tops, wheels rolling down ramps,colliding balls, and Archimedes-in-the-bathtub displacements. Evenphysics professors guess the wrong outcome if they are not allowed tofiddle with equations on paper. (If they are, they spend a quarter of anhour working it out and then announce that the problem is "trivial.")When it comes to these motions, video animations of impossible eventslook quite natural. Indeed, possible events look unnatural: a spinning